SOURCE: Tindall, William York. “Exiles.” In A Readers Guide to James Joyce, pp. 104–22. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1959.

In the following essay, Tindall discusses the autobiographical nature of Joyce's works, with a focus on Exiles.

However simple its surface, Exiles is one of the more difficult of Joyce's works. Questions of theme, motive, and general meaning plague audience or readers, whatever their chairs, in pit or closet. As Stephen Hero is the poorest, so Exiles is the most painful, of Joyce's works. Critics have found it of little or no value and so have most producers. But Joyce, lost in admiration of his accomplishment, found merits that escaped less generous critics. His concern and disappointment attended the general neglect.1

Production denied him, Joyce insisted upon immediate publication, as if, for him, Exiles claimed a place in the sequence of his works between A Portrait and Ulysses. One...